Embodiments of the invention relate generally to World Wide Web applications, and more particularly, to automating the processing of web tasks in response to user requests.
Mobile applications generally use the World Wide Web (web) to allow users to quickly look up information, download small amounts of data, or to access private computer systems during short interactions while away from the office or home. In a typical use scenario, the user may access a web site or a private server with a mobile telephone or a hand-held computer device that has limited web browsing capabilities. For example, these mobile devices may have small display screens, simplified keypads, limited network bandwidth, or minimum graphics support. User requests for web tasks from such devices are generally in the form of short and specific commands. For example, a user may send short text messages to find out road conditions for a particular highway from a weather web site, retrieve operating hours and address of a local business, or forward office phone calls to a voice mail system.
Web applications often require a user to download the entire content of related web pages to find the desired information. For example, the address of the business that the user is interested in may appear on one web page while the business' operating hours may be on a different web page. The user would need to download both of these web pages in order to find the business address and operating hours information. In addition, a user may need to access a sequence of web pages to reach a web page that contains the information of interest.
Today's web pages include substantial graphic contents, which may take a significant amount of time to download to a remote portable device due to the device's limited resources and network overheads. In many common use scenarios, the graphic contents and large amount of downloaded data may not be needed by the user or be suitable for mobile applications running on devices with resource constraints. In addition, they generate unnecessary network traffic and additional system workloads.